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Taipei in August

I haven’t blogged in a while! And yes! I know I say that every single time. Sorry! I want to get back into it again (I also think this every time!) Recently I’ve been thinking about how I used to be better at certain things, like sharing and writing about life online. I guess it stopped being fun when social media and social networking “happened” in a systematic way and “things that I do anyway” became capitalized Content. There’s the pressure that everything I share has to have a purpose and it has to represent me or the work that I want to do. And then I spend too much time distracting myself with the platform(s) and obsessing whether everything is perfect, and the next thing you know you end up sitting on 5 years of photos no one has seen. But I think I have learned to manage that overthinking part of my brain better, so I could tell it to shut up when I need to finish something. So anyway, we are moving on, lots of #throwback photos will be coming, and lots of walks down memory lane because I’m a photographer and a Cancer/Pisces so that’s just what happens.

This summer I went on a 41-day trip with my parents, our main destination was Hong Kong, but we took a detour to London and Helsinki. Did you know about this YYZ > LHR > HEL > HKG route with British Airways and Finnair? Yeah it exists and it’s kinda cool. I had originally booked myself a week-long trip to Taiwan, intended to explore other regions of the island, since I had only spent time in Taipei when I was last there working on a documentary (which I just realized I had never posted about, but you can watch it here now). But other family plans came up (Tokyo plans, so don’t feel sorry for me) so I cut the Taiwan trip from a week to two days, and asked my friend Kar to come with me.

Taipei was hot, and remarkably and refreshingly less crowded than the other places I’ve visited on this trip (i.e. London and Hong Kong). We met up with some friends, ate and drank, and went inside too many Eslites. Two days were too short for sure, but I can’t wait to go back again.

Heads up, probably unlike every Taiwan post you come across—there are no food photos in this post (nor the Taipei 101), I’m sorry—mostly for myself because I definitely didn’t eat enough, but there’s always next time…

Somewhere over the South China Sea! I love blue, also the gradient looked like the colour of my hair then :)

We stayed near the Taipei 101 in the Xinyi District. We were exploring and stumbled upon the much the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (松山文創園區), it was quite quiet the day we went, we checked out some shops and galleries and got bit by some mosquitos, yay!

Friends at the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall that was surprisingly empty. I usually hate blurry photos but I really liked the grain and ~vibe~ in this lol

Last thoughts (because I personally love the behind the scenes of everything): I realize that these photos are super different from the stuff I usually post. I’ve gotten into the terrible habit of only shooting when I work (camera = responsibility = not fun fun sometimes) so I’m trying to remedy that. I also debated whether to include phone photos in this post, but instead of taking half a day to ruminate into inaction, I made the decision in a minute. See, I’m learning. Thank you for reading this far!